That included a nightly dose of Sinatra, courtesy of dad — longtime Herald political affairs columnist Don — along with the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac on weekends, and a generous helping of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

“Probably the reason I started singing in the first place was that I was trying to imitate Ella Fitzgerald on the record player,” Braid says.

“And then,” she adds, “I found out she had the same birthday as me, and I thought that was magical

All that singing paid off for Braid, who’s one of the cast members in Ride the Cyclone, a zombie high school musical of sorts that is here through the weekend as part of the 2013 High Performance Rodeo.

The show, which is perhaps more in the musical tradition of Evil Dead: The Musical than Le Miz, was a sensation from the moment it was launched out of Victoria several years back.

For Braid, whose career is just getting started (she was also seen in Theatre Calgary’s wonderful 2010 production of Much Ado About Nothing), getting to play a villainous, recently deceased teenage girl is the role of her dreams.

“What I love about playing Ocean is that it’s never, ever easy,” Braid says. “Every day I learn something new about her, because I constantly have to work at making sure she’s not just this two dimensional villain, that she has a reason for doing everything she does — she has her fears, she has her motivation, and it’s not very often that women get to play such well-rounded characters, especially women — I’m only 25 and I’m getting to play this completely fleshed-out character.”

On the phone, Braid has one of those deep, smokey voices you associate with a certain kind of 1940s movie star, and in fact, that’s sort of the idea, in a 21st century kinda way — bring back Rosalind Russell, Kate Hepburn and — of course — Bette Davis.

“I don’t think I’d be an actress if I hadn’t watched All About Eve,” she says.

“I still just want to be Bette Davis. That’s my goal. I don’t know on a personal level, because she seemed kind of scary, but I love that her career got better as she aged.

“It’s really important to me,” she adds, “that young actresses develop all of their emotions and don’t get caught up in the physical part of it or physical side of it and being something they’re not, and Bette Davis is a perfect example of that.”

*

Jan Lisiecki may have already performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre in New York, but the second year music student still can’t go to the pub and drink a pitcher with his classmates.

“I can’t go to the pub yet,” 17-year-old Lisiecki says, over the phone from Toronto, where he’s in his second year studying at the Glenn Gould School (part of the Royal Conservatory). “Not in Ontario and not in Alberta, either.”

Not that Lisiecki has any time to argue about the end of the NHL lockout in a pub. The day he speaks to the Herald, he’s still recovering from the past week, during which time he recorded his second album for the prestigious Deutche Grammophone label.

“Four days, 10 and a half hours of recorded music, 343 takes,” Lisiecki says, and my fingertips hurt just hearing about that much piano-playing crammed into a single work week.

“It goes very quick,” he says. “It’s a lot of work. It’s fun. I enjoyed it.”

The big difference between the first (Mozart) album and the second (Chopin), which he recorded in The Royal Conservatory’s Koerner Hall, is that Lisiecki did the first one with an orchestra.

“On the one hand, (recording with an orchestra), you have friends onstage,” he says. “You have somebody to share the experience with.

“On the other hand, you have less time, because an orchestra -with union rules and regulations — it’s quite strict on the time.

“It’s completely different, because here, you’re completely alone. “You have nobody to back you up and you have freedom at the same time — so I enjoy both of them in a very different way.”

When he’s not recording albums for prestigious record labels, he’s touring — around 100 shows a year, including a recent gig performing with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City.

Either that, or studying.

“Beyond the musical side of it, and the musical theory, there’s art history,” he says, “And of course, two semesters of English.

“You (also) have to take sciences, some math, social studies or social sciences — and German and Italian as well.”

As for Carnegie Hall v. Avery Fisher (Lincoln Centre) Hall, it turns out that Carnegie has the acoustic advantage over Avery Fisher, although the Lincoln Centre is planning a big makeover of its concert hall.

All of which brings the conversation around to the promising acoustic prospects for the Bella Concert Hall, the new music conservatory being built at Mount Royal University, where Lisiecki studied as a talented kid growing up in Calgary.

“I am looking forward to when it’s built, and seeing how it is,” he says.

Either that, or how about playing at the grand opening, some time in early 2015? By then, he’ll be able to celebrate by going for a beer in the campus pub.

“Maybe I will be there for the inauguration,” he says. “To hear it.”

*

A mini-opera moment broke out Wednesday morning at the Jube, when a half-dozen of the Calgary Opera’s emerging artists burst into song in the lobby.

That’s because it was a good news day for the Calgary Opera Association, which learned that the federal government was committing $250,000 in funding over the next two years to go toward the opera’s successful Emerging Artists Program.

“What this program offers is a transition from academic studies to professional careers,” said the Opera’s CEO Bob McPhee. (This year’s Emerging Artist program features eight emerging artists).

“(With this program), we have the opportunity to bring young artists from across Canada and assist them in their artistic development.”

For Minister of State (Transport) Steven Fletcher, who spoke on behalf of Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, supporting career development for young Canadian artists doesn’t just produce a healthy cultural scene. It also produces hundreds of thousands (630,000) of jobs that generate ($46) billion dollars in economic activity.

“That is why,” Fletcher said, “our government wants to insure the next generation of Canadian artists get the training they deserve.”

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